Cred

Reading again about "Girl Geek Cred." Apparently nowadays non-girl geeks hold girl geeks to a higher standard. Standard of what, I do not know.

But as a girl (well, at my age I'm not really a girl but in the interest of alliteration...) who has always been some variety of what is now called "geek," I am bemused at the notion that anyone who isn't genuinely interested in a "geeky" subject would find it useful to pretend to be.

Now I am antisocial by nature. (A friend of mine says a better term is "asocial" which is probably true.)  As I've mentioned before, I was an unashamed teenage comic book reader. I'd bring a stack of floppies to school and read them during study hall. (Good students could get away with that, back then.) On a school trip to the city, I insisted on visiting my first-ever comic book shop. (The other kids were probably not thrilled but they tolerated it well enough.)  If there had been comic book t-shirts back then I would have worn them.  All of this for the same reason I do anything--because the subject interested me. Why else would I spend time on it?

I still love me some comics, although I certainly don't spend the time or money on it I once did, and I still consider myself a comic geek. (Well, I do now that I've heard the term.) 

On the other hand, my interest in, say, video games, is much more sporadic. I like them, sometimes. I don't like all of them. I am a very casual player of video games. Not at all a video game geek.

I used to read a lot of science fiction. I don't any more. So, at one point I may have been a sci-fi geek but now I am not.

Does being a "comic geek" let me call myself a geek, unspecified?

My question is--do basketball fans get on hockey fans, say they're not "real" fans? I don't think so. I think sports folks recognize the notion of subcategories within an interest, and that not all sports fans have the same focus..